“It’s not you,” Skan said, his own voice rasping and frantic. “It’s the Eclipse! That idiot Hadanelith has to be dramatic, he would never strike at any time but the height of the Eclipse! Hurry!”
“I’m hurrying,” Amberdrake snarled, doubtful if the red haze he saw was due to the Eclipse. “I’m hurryingl”
Shalaman stood tall and proud beneath his heavy weight of fine ceremonial robes, and surveyed his people.
They were gathered below him in a vast sea of faces, as many as could fit into the largest open section of Palace grounds. The Palace gates had been opened today to the public, as they were only opened on the most important of ceremonial occasions, and citizens of the city had been lined up for days to enter, squeezed in together on the other side of a barrier of guards, to view the Eclipse Ceremony with the Court. They were jammed together so tightly that none of them could move. The sheer numbers were overwhelming. Colors warred with each other, and the glare of sunlight on jewelry threw rainbow-hued flashes up into his eyes at unpredictable moments.
The heat down there must have been unbearable, but no one complained or showed any sign of it. This was the Eclipse Ceremony, and time for changes, and no one here wanted to miss a single word.
They were all silent, as his people seldom were. It was entirely possible to hear birds singing evening songs above the faint murmur of breathing and whispers. The light had been thinning for some time now—triggering the birds to go into their sunset melodies—and although it could not be said that the air was getting colder, the sunlight on his skin burned less with every passing moment.
To his right stood Winterhart, and to his left his three Advisors; otherwise, he was alone on the platform of three steps raising up above the level of the crowd. In his mind, he was alone, for he and he alone could make the decision about the people of White Gryphon. He was the King; they would listen. They loved him; they knew his loyalty to their interests.
He turned his troubled attention, though not his eyes, on the pale-skinned people from the north. They stood in a group, held away from the platform by an intervening phalanx of his personal bodyguards. He had not wanted to show them any particular favor until he had made up his mind.
He had to recalculate everything he had planned last night. All along, although he had permitted them to remain in doubt, he had planned to bring them into the “changes to come” portion of the ceremony, whether or not the actual murderers were found in time. It would have been better if they had been, of course, but that wasn’t strictly necessary. Any words spoken by a Truthsayer during the latter half of the Ceremony had special import, and only today Shalaman had decided to call upon Leyuet to impart publicly all he had learned from the minds of Amberdrake and Winterhart. Having a Bound Couple in the Court would bring special blessings from the gods, and having Leyuet declare Amberdrake’s innocence at that point in the Ceremony would give his words all the force of the Gods’ Voices.
But he would need the Gryphon King to do that, to speak for his friend—and the Gryphon King was not in evidence. Amberdrake could not be there to speak for himself—officially, he was supposedly mad, and the mad were specifically excluded from the Ceremony.
Without either of the two principals, there was nothing he could do about the settlement and the people in it, not with murder charges hanging over them and no one to receive Leyuet’s blessing and declaration of innocence.
He’d sent his men for the kestra’chern a few moments ago anyway, out of pure desperation. The priests wouldn’t like the fact that Amberdrake hadn’t been cleansed, but that was too bad. If Leyuet declared him sane, his presence wouldn’t taint the Ceremony, and once that innocence was made public, the White Gryphon folk could be made allies. But his men weren’t back yet, either, and he had taken up as much time with prayer and chanting as he could.
The one thing he could not delay was the Eclipse itself, and it was about to move into its final phase.
He looked down at the image of the sun’s face, cleverly duplicated in the middle of a square of shadow at his feet. The shadow itself was cast by a thin plate of stone with a round hole in it, which allowed a single round beam of light to shine directly in front of the King. What happened to that round dot of sunlight was replicated in the heavens above, and there was a substantial bite in the circle, a bite of darkness that was visibly increasing. Out there in the gardens, the beams of light that filtered through the tree branches to fall on the ground also had bites of shadow taken out of them, forming dapples of crescents, and those who were wise were watching them instead of squinting up impotently at the sun-disk itself.
Still no sign of the Gryphon King or of Amberdrake.
This must be as the gods have willed it; we have certainly tried for another solution. With a heavy heart, he raised the staff of his office high over his head and began to intone the Words of Change.
And at that precise moment, as if the gesture had called him there, Amberdrake appeared on the second step of the platform out of thin air.
Shalaman stared at him, mouth agape. What—the men must have found him—the priests must have built him a magical Portal and sent him directly here so that he would be in time! He felt giddy with relief. Things were going to be fine after all.
But in the next instant, his relief turned to confusion.
There was shouting and pushing down among the Kaled’a’in, and instead of rushing to greet her beloved, Winterhart gasped and recoiled from him.
And there was something very odd, and very wrong, with the hungry expression on Amberdrake’s face. No sane human wore an expression like that!
Shalaman backed up a pace himself, a cold chill falling over his heart as he looked into Amberdrake’s eyes. There was no sign of sanity there, and he wondered wildly if this were the real Amberdrake after all—if the man was demon-ridden, and this demonic side of him had been the one responsible for the murders! Certainly this man looked capable of any kind of evil!
The guards were not responding. Of course they aren’t! I told them myself to let him through when he arrived, and they can’t see his face, so they don’t know anything is wrong!
Shalaman opened his mouth to call for help— And could not get any sound to come out. Nor could he move. He was held in place as securely as if someone had bound him in chains and stood him there. He struggled against his invisible bonds to no avail; they held him fast in the position he had last taken, staff held above his head and free arm outstretched to the sun.
And the last of the sun slipped behind the moon, throwing them all into darkness.
Amberdrake laughed, a horrible, high-pitched giggling; he pulled a knife out of the breast of his tunic, and lunged up the stairs toward Shalaman while the folk of White Gryphon struggled against the guards, shouting incoherently.
Amberdrake screamed and lunged forward with the knife in a vicious series of slashes, cutting the darkness with the glitter of his blade, displaying a knife-fighter’s threat show, weaving a pattern of death in the air.
The space of a single breath passed, and a slim figure in silver interposed itself between Shalaman and his assassin.